Did Twitter’s Removal of Government and State-Affiliated Media Labels Expand the Influence of State Actors?
PaCSS 2023 APSA Pre-Conference
August 30, 2023
“Unlike independent media, state-affiliated media frequently use their news coverage as a means to advance a political agenda. We believe that people have the right to know when a media account is affiliated directly or indirectly with a state actor” (Twitter, 2020).
Sources: Internet Archive, Twitter
Source: Rest of World, Lumen Database
Sources: DFRLab, Twitter, Internet Archive
1,177 accounts linked to Chinese, Iranian, and Russian state actors
Proxy for accounts that had government and state-affiliated media labels
twarc CLITweet timeline endpoint; up to ~3,200 tweets per account
Successfully collected data from 1,038 timelines
Daily aggregated volumes 📈
Retweets
RTs of media accounts ⬆️
RTs of Russian accounts ⬆️
Likes
⬆️ likes of Russian accounts compared to Chinese/Iranian accounts
Tweets by state actors
⬆️ tweets by media accounts
⬆️ tweets by Russian and Chinese accounts
koh@hertie-school.org
https://allisonkoh.github.io/
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